Bright bunch mark new centre of grey suburb

The new council offices and swimming pool in Finglas are a bright gathering of buildings that provide a valuable centre for the community and a focus for the suburb, says Emma Cullinan

Finglas Swimming Pool displays its innards to the outside world, with blue pool tiles wrapped around part of the exterior.

If you want to get really carried away with the aqua analogies you could imagine that the glass section below it represents water and the rippling metal covering the larger of the building's two blocks is the waves.

Whatever, it does make for an inviting building which was all part of the plan.

This new leisure centre sits in Mellowes Park next to the N2 in Finglas, north Dublin. At first, the idea was to refurbish the existing swimming pool which, like many of the Dublin City Council pools, had seen better days.

"When I began work in the 1970s all swimming pools in Dublin were run by the corporation," says Stephen Kealy, leisure services manager. "Then the private sector came on board and many of the corporation pools gradually became run down."

Now Dublin City Council is making a comeback. The Markievicz pool was the first to be refurbished, and others include Finglas, Ballymun and Ballyfermot with Rathmines in the offing.

Once it was decided to build a new leisure centre here, rather than repair the old pool, the project gathered momentum and Donnelly Turpin Architects' brief expanded to include area offices for Dublin City Council, a family resource centre and crèche, a youth centre and sports facilities.

Dublin City Council was keen to have buildings that were accessible but robust enough to discourage vandalism. "We wanted to solve this in an architectural way," says partner Mark Turpin who opted for clever, subtle measures rather than heavy-handed fencing and ominous façades.

The result is a colourful gathering of buildings, with tiling, glass and black kalp limestone rubble walls at ground level chosen because they make poor canvases for graffiti artists. The car-park fronting the main road was designed, along with the rest of the open space, to be a civic plaza with its low bollards, trees and benches.

A right of way that ran to one side of the site now comes through the centre to encourage people in, and a green area has been incorporated as a mini park. Noting that Finglas, comprising neighbourhood upon neighbourhood of two-storey houses, was filled with useless green pockets, the architects set about creating quality, usable spaces on this site.

In this sea of houses, Finglas needed a landmark, and it certainly has one now. The reddish/orange council offices can be seen from the M50 and Kealy says that you just have to ask taxi drivers to go to the "leisure centre"; they all know where it is.

Part of the council offices is reminiscent of Modernist buildings, such as Le Corbusier's Villa Stein with its bands of windows and protruding elements; and Josef Fischer's Villa Hoffman in Budapest. But this is very much an original, with the bands of windows by-passing each other, causing the façade to snake around them.

To the top are neat vertical slits balanced further along the building, and around to the front are protruding windows with large, single sheets of glass. These have vast timber sills on which you can sit or, in the case of the one to the front, stand and look right across Dublin to the mountains.

Finglas is 58 metres above the city and, with the height of the building, this enables a spectacular view. Although I'm assured by staff that they have no time to lounge around on the window sills, these spots in buildings are always a draw; somewhere to park yourself and indulge your inner, sleepy cat.

Another departure from the marks of Modernism is the fact that the building is red (courtesy of Irish architects' favoured exterior brand: Keim paints). "It was going to be white all the way through the project and then, when it came to the painting stage, we just thought it would be too predictable," says Turpin.

The red block is a rich, and witty, addition to the area, and is carefully balanced and lightened by being suspended above white columns and a grey tiled wall. Beside the red box is a Kalzip aluminium tower that shoots past the end of the red element towards the pool building.

Vertical windows run up this overshoot picking up on the small slit windows and counterbalancing the ribbon windows.

The crinkly tin cladding brings a wonderful lightness and sense of accessibility borrowing, as it does, from industry and agriculture; this could almost be a beautiful type of silage tower.

Undulating aluminium also flows over the pool in the larger of the two linear blocks that comprise the leisure centre (the bigger block houses the pool hall and gym while the smaller block accommodates the entrance and changing area). Between these two blocks a narrow band of rooflights runs the full length of the building, separating the two forms with a shaft of light.

"We whittled the shape down to the essence and the roof light between the two parts makes the building completely legible," says Turpin.

Certainly, as you enter, there are no worries about where to go. The changing rooms are ahead of you (mixed men and women, with various sizes of cubicles) and these are open to the whole pool area, as are the showers through which you walk before entering the pool. Humans are a filthy bunch and the act of showering before swimming saves the council thousands upon thousands of euro in pool filtration costs.

As with the changing rooms, the pool is accessible to all people at practically all times because of a pool floor that can be lifted and lowered. The floor, at one end, can be raised or lowered to any depth between two metres and six inches.

This means the pool can be used flexibly by dividing it, perhaps into three, with an aquarobics class in one part, lane swimming in another, a parent/toddler class in another.

This space is huge, topped by that soaring crinkly tin roof, and is lit by four large skylights that let in northern light (direct sunlight is a no-no in swimming pools; too reflective) and classic factory-style aluminium lamps.

"We visited pools in the North and the UK where there's more public investment in pools - which is beginning here - and the best of them were in the biggest, brightest spaces. They are like train stations," says Turpin.

This is a social space enclosed by simple materials that have been beautifully detailed. The council wanted an accessible, robust, non-threatening group of buildings, and that's what they have. These are brightly coloured, balanced structures that encompass a pleasant outside space. It's a memorable place too; few children who attend the crèche will ever forget their circle time beneath that sky-light in the form of an inverted copper ice-cream cone.

This gathering of buildings provides a centre for the community and that community has responded, not least the OAPs, who enjoy free entry.

They have established quite a social gathering in the steam room each morning, followed by a leisurely swim and a cappuccino by the pool.